Lucian Freud’s Potted Plants

By Giovanni Aloi, Guest Curator

In 1939, Lucian Freud painted a stack of clay pots. At first glance, this is a simple and charming image. On the right is a potted prickly pear (opuntia). On the left is a small silvery pachyphytum. From the perspective of a plant lover, there isn’t much to see… The pads of the prickly pear are cropped by the picture frame—much of the plant is left out. It is not what Freud wanted to focus on. The pachyphytum looks unassuming and fragile in its tiny clay pot. Unusual in composition and even stranger in subject, this is one of the most overlooked paintings by Lucian Freud. But this is one of Freud’s most meaningful works, especially if considered in the context of his long-lasting determination to paint plants in a way that no other artist had previously done. Potted plants have a long history and yet western art has had a complicated relationship with them.

It is known that clay and ceramic pots were widely used in India, Japan, China, and Korea over 3000 years ago, mostly to bring plants closer to houses and in courtyards rather than indoors. Terracotta plant pots have been found in the Minoan palace at Knossos on Crete. The Romans preferred to plant lemon trees in large marble pots. And throughout the Middle Ages, pots were used in convents to grow herbs as well as to keep life-saving medicinal plants close at hand.

Symbolic meanings were derived from sacred scriptures and biblical Apocrypha. Initially devised to educate protestant viewers of northern European countries, they subsequently became very fashionable with the mercantile and landowner classes in Italy, Spain, and France. The Protestant church saw religious images of sacred figures as idolatrous, spurring never-ending controversies over the use of icons in worship. Faced with the impossibility of painting sacred figures, artists found in the silence of plants a precious opportunity.

A vase filled with an elaborate and indeed impossible bunch of flowers could be arranged to exemplify our ability to find meaning in god’s creation and to also govern it. Flower arrangements exemplified man’s superiority over nature. Man brought harmony to the unruliness of the natural world. Potted plants didn’t fit the symbolic mold and as such, they were mostly ignored by artists. Potted plants only began to appear in modern art as religious symbolism fell out of fashion. Paul Cezanne, Van Gogh, Edward Manet, Berth Morisot, and Edvard Munch–it was at the turn of the 19^th century, that the plant pot began to play a role in art.

Throughout his career, Freud painted his potted plants often. While researching for my book, Lucian Freud Herbarium, I have identified at least twelve works by Freud in which potted plants are prominently portrayed. From Interior at Paddington (1951) which features a monumental potted yucca, to the smaller detail of the same plant in Balcony Still Life to Large Interior Paddington, (1968-69) capturing a sprawling potted zimmerlinde, or Self-Portrait, Reflection Listening (1967-68) and the delicate Small Fern (1967). Freud has proudly painted potted plants as a mark of individual distinction: it’s this plant—not any other plant, his paintings state. This, I explain in my exhibition catalog essay, is the one of the factors that led Freud to paint true plant portraits rather than pictures of plants as other artists had done before him.